


Not a Ghost Story

by tosca1390



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-29
Updated: 2013-04-29
Packaged: 2017-12-09 21:11:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,497
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/778026
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tosca1390/pseuds/tosca1390
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>George had been an axis, a point of reference for years, but she had a life before George Kirk, filled with research and plants and alien sentient foliage, award-winning papers and articles. And she had sons by him now, and that required a life</i> after <i>George Kirk as well.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Not a Ghost Story

*

When George died, Winona was not wrecked for life.

George had been an axis, a point of reference for years, but she had a life before George Kirk, filled with research and plants and alien sentient foliage, award-winning papers and articles. And she had sons by him now, and that required a life _after_ George Kirk as well.

It was a simple story, one rife with cliché; a grieving widow with two young sons by a lost, hero-husband, needed to carry on however she could, put aside her own grief and care for her children. She should tell them about their father, how he loved them, how he died for them, and how that should make them feel better, make them feel that it mattered, that they mattered.

Somehow, it got lost in translation, what she was _supposed_ to do. 

She came back to Earth to a young preschooler, with a baby and without a husband, kept George’s family farmhouse in Iowa, but set George aside. He would haunt their lives no matter what she told the boys, but they shouldn’t have their dead father as their standard, their bar to meet in life, because that didn’t lead anywhere but the afterlife. 

So, she settled in the farmhouse, married a man who didn’t understand kids but wasn’t _awful_ to them, and set on making _herself_ the standard. She provided for her boys, wrapped herself in the coverings of poisonous plants and strands of plant-based viruses, boring and tedious and thrilling. She went off-planet for months at a time, but was always home for birthdays, especially Jim’s. When they asked about their father, she told them stories of the Academy, of a serious boy who met a seriously fractured girl and how they had two seriously wonderful kids. 

Nothing about heroes and villains and space.

*

When Jim was seven (and still smiled at her when she returned from research on distant worlds, bright as the sun and toothy when she walked in the door, no matter what hour of day), a command-track cadet about to graduate sent her a private comm with a dissertation attached. Christopher Pike, his name was, and she expected something along the lines of sentient trees, or something along her expertise, using some of her research perhaps; she got a few of these every year around graduation, just as a thank-you, she supposed. 

This was not one of those. 

His dissertation was on the _Kelvin_ , full of details on all members of the crew, command, science, research, the whole bit. He had the recordings of those last moments, and _god_ she could hear Jim’s first cries, just as she was still there, George rambling about Tiberius, his final _I love_ —

For hours, she locked herself in her bedroom, stared at the ceiling, breathed through the memories. Iowa went dark-dusky-red-orange around her. Sam scratched at the door a few times, murmuring about dinner, going to pick up pizza with Frank, they’d be back in a while, Jim’s still here, Mom—

Jim, he just cracked the lock.

From under the blanket that still smelled like George when she shut her eyes hard enough, she could hear soft footsteps, smell the hay and grass and dirt that Jim always seemed to carry with him, no matter how many times he bathed. He hoisted himself on the bed, crouching in the corner by her feet, and she couldn’t hide anymore. Not with Jim there.

Taking a deep breath, she lifted the blanket from her head, looking down with still-puffy eyes at her too-skinny boy, all tow-headed and gangly. “How’d you do it?” she asked, voice a little hoarse.

Jim shrugged, and he looked all bones and skin, worried. “A couple ‘a bobby pins,” he said, not apologetic, not sheepish. Factual. Solid. Like George.

( _In their second year at the Academy, after her father’s death off-world, she locked herself in her quarters, fail-safes including, because she just wanted to be_ alone. _After five hours, George hacked in and picked the lock, so to speak. Seeing him at the foot of her bed, she had been angry for maybe three minutes before letting him curl up on her tiny regulation twin bed and hold her until she stopped shaking from tears she would never shed._ ) 

She smiled, the pain breaking through her chest in fresh currents. “Teach yourself?”

“Yeah,” he said, hesitating for a moment before he crawled up along her length, pressing his bony limbs against her soft curves. “You mad?”

She touched his hair, eyes straying to the padd on her nightstand, still glowing with torturous words. “No, Jimmy. I’m not mad. You’re a clever boy,” she said softly, kissing his brow, wanting so badly to keep him at her side like this forever, keep him whole and shielded.

Later, after tucking the boys in, she hid the file in the depths of her Starfleet account, and pushed George back and back, locking him deep in the dark parts of her heart. For years, she had forgotten those moments, that loss; she wanted to keep it that way.

*

At nine, Jim stole Frank’s car, and nearly flew off a cliff to his death.

She was off-planet when it happened, and when she came back weeks later, buzzing with maternal concern, Jim didn’t smile when she walked in. In fact, he accused her of abandonment with steely silence. 

When she asked Sam, he told her nothing, just shrugged and went back to his books.

Frank, he was just stewing and pissed over the loss of his antique car.

She never found out what flipped Jim’s switch, but _god_ , she felt the loss of her little sunshine boy. She felt it like George all over again.

*

As Jim grew older and colder, Winona stopped trying to know his inner workings, his story. 

Sam, she understood. He was George in bits of shining pieces, broad-browed and eyes-wide-open to the world. Sam wanted air and land and success, he wanted to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the ghost of George Kirk, not fear it. He wasn’t as quick as Jim, but he worked hard, like a madman, like George. When he enrolled in Starfleet a year early, it was because he’d earned it. 

Frank had always liked Sam more than Jim, felt he could talk to Sam like an adult. Talking to Jim, he had told her more than once over comms and the dinner table and the darkness of their bed, was like talking to bricks.

Jim didn’t apply himself, but he didn’t need to. He was quick and stupidly smart and knew it. After the car incident, he was a mystery to her just as Sam was an open book, guarded and stoic, and she couldn’t for the life of her figure out _why_ and _how_ it had happened like this. She remembered a sunny kid, smiling and happy to see her. Somehow, it got lost, misread in between the lines; somewhere, he began to hate her.

She stopped going off-world when Jim was fifteen, when Sam was eighteen. Jim had finally driven Frank off the deep end, and it was only her and Jim in the looming farmhouse. She kept to her office and her research and her plants; he kept to anywhere but there. She tried to talk about a future, any future; she tried Starfleet once, and Jim ripped out of the house like a tornado, but silent and deadly.

He liked books, old books, _paper_ ; the one gift she knew he liked from her was George’s old collection of Shakespeare, and his many anthologies of poetry, passed on from generations ago. On his seventeenth birthday, a night he went out and didn’t come home until noon the next day, she left it on the foot of his bed. 

( _Jim never said thank you, never acknowledged it, but when Jim finally left home, ran away, the one personal thing he took, other than clothes and credits, were all those books_.)

When she looked at Sam, she saw George, and it didn’t hurt. When she looked at Jim, she saw loss and inner wreckage and an absence; she saw shards of herself, and it _stung_.

*

It was Sam who told her that Jim had joined Starfleet.

Sam, her boy with the serious smile and the scientist gaze, came to Iowa with research and papers and pleading requests from the brass to go off to some alien planet for developmental assistance, and a sparse note from Jim. It wasn’t addressed to her, but Sam let her read it nevertheless.

_Went into Starfleet. I’m going to do better than him._

“How’d they finally do it?” she asked Sam over dinner, between conversations of alien fauna and parasitic herbs. 

“Do what?” he asked, swallowing a mouthful of potato.

“Get him to enlist,” she said, plate half-full and cool.

Sam shrugged. “Someone pushed Dad on him, I’m sure.”

“We’ve all done that,” she said distantly. “He’s command track, I suppose.”

Sam looked at her in silence with George’s eyes. He had darker coloring, hair brown, always tan, but he had George’s eyes. “You know, they make all second-year command cadets read Pike’s dissertation on the _Kelvin_. It’s a part of the prep for the _Kobayashi Maru_ ,” he said after a long spell of quiet. 

The tips of her fingers went cold. “You’re a scientist,” she said softly.

“I didn’t read it, Mom,” Sam said, voice low. “But Jim did.”

“How do you know?” she asked, an odd tightness in her chest. 

He shrugged. “Jim’s good with computers. When he was nine, he hacked into your Starfleet files. You had it saved. He read it, told me about it. He seemed really… I don’t know, bothered?”

She bypassed the hacking, she knew Jim was that smart—but the dissertation—

It made sense, finally. The car. The angry silence. At nine years old, Jim’s entire being became wrapped up in the reputation and the actions of a man who’d died on his birthday—she’d tried so hard to shield him from that day, to make his birthday something they _could_ celebrate—all of that effort, for nothing.

When she looked at Sam again, he was staring her down, eyes hooded. “Why didn’t you tell us about it, Mom?” he asked finally, voice gruff. 

She sighed. “I didn’t want you defining yourself by one day, Sam. I was trying to protect you,” she said firmly. 

“I figured as much. Told Jim as much. He didn’t buy it,” he said, clearing his throat. “Jim saved a copy. Carried it with him for years.”

The silence was telling, accusatory; Winona would never escape this blame.

“I’m going back to research,” she said finally, voice thick and catching. “Heading up the alien flora lab at Starfleet’s main campus. I’ll even instruct, a little.”

Sam raised a brow, skeptical. “Are you going to see Jim?”

In a motion shared across the family, she shrugged. “From across the quad.”

Not yet. Perhaps never.

*

Each time Winona heard it, the story of James Tiberius Kirk was different. 

At first, it was traumatic and saturated with pain, a son born at his father’s death, cursed by the leftovers of a too-short, too-heroic life. Jim rattled away his youth in boredom, too smart and too clever for the hicks of Iowa, but unable to escape because of a rough stepfather and an absent mother—

( _And that is when she got those stares across mess halls and laboratories, wondering how she could let such travesties occur, such a bright young boy who could have been so much more at a younger age_ )

Then, it morphed into a near-eulogy, mourning the loss of such a smart man to alcohol and bar fights, demerits and long-winded discussions of almost-dismissal. 

( _After those, and once it was clear Jim Kirk would never be kicked out of Starfleet, the glances and looks turned into disbelief and questioning, and she knew they all thought she had something to do with it, had emailed the brass with tears and wails of a lost husband and a leftover son_ )

What was fascinating was the near-mythology that Jim’s life story had erupted into, and how, interestingly enough, she was not a part of it. It was all George, the complete opposite of everything she had wanted for both her sons, and for herself.

*

In the cool autumn of Jim’s third year at the academy, Winona was at Starfleet’s medical facility, giving a lecture on allergies linked to alien flora, when she met Jim’s best friend.

The doctors and cadets were filing out, and she was down at the front, answering a few extra questions from some overly eager cadets. Weak sun filtered through the room, catching on a tall, dark-haired man who hadn’t stopped staring at her for the whole lecture, and as she said goodbye to the stragglers, she mentally prepared herself for the questions on George and Jim and the _Kelvin_ , because that’s _all_ she was good for, sometimes. 

“Is it Commander?”

She looked the man over, cocking a brow. “Lieutenant Commander.”

He swallowed hard, holding out a hand. “Doctor Leonard McCoy. I’m—I’m Jim’s friend.”

Startled, she shook his hand slowly, admiring the grip, the calluses under his fingertips. “Jim wasn’t one for friends, from what I recall,” she said after a moment. 

McCoy snorted. “He still isn’t, don’t worry,” he said dryly, a hint of a drawl coming out in his words. “I don’t mean to be rude, but he didn’t even tell me you were here—“

“I’m not sure he knows, Doctor,” she interrupted easily, leaning back against the lecture podium with a hand on her hip. “He isn’t so fond of me, from what I can tell.”

Gaze narrowing, McCoy clutched his padd a little closer to his middle. “He is, ma’am,” he said quietly, and there was something in his voice, something hot and deep that had her voice catching in her throat. “I bet he’d like to see you.”

She glanced over this doctor, watching how he held himself, the loss dark in his eyes, the something more; she was an expert at the façade, and knew one when she saw one. But then, she thought that Jim had done well, in this guy. “Is he doing well, in his courses?” she asked softly after a moment.

McCoy rolled his eyes. “Yeah, without trying, the bastard,” he muttered, then looked up at her as if electrified. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—“

She laughed at that, tears pressing hot and hard against the backs of her eyes. “It’s not a problem. Sounds like Jim.”

He smiled, and his face lit up. “Going to graduate at the top of the class, ma’am. And he’s already decided he’s going to beat the _Kobayashi Maru_ , cocky jerk,” he added, but without real heat. 

Something deep in her chest panged deeply, like a distant bell, echoing through her limbs. “I’m sure he will,” she said softly.

He licked his lips, still on edge. “I reckon you’ve heard some things, about Jim—but he’s not fighting anymore. Still drinking some, still reckless in other ways—“ and from the twitch in his brow, the thinning of his lips, Winona could tell in just _what_ ways, and how it bothered the doctor— “but he’s done with the crazy stuff, ma’am. He’s going to be a great captain.”

She held her breath, all the muscles of her body tense, as he shook his head with a silent sigh. “I just—well, I just wanted you to know that he’s okay. That he’s better than okay,” he finished firmly. 

She breathed out easily, unable to keep a small smile from her face, because yes, she had wanted to know. An easy quiet settled between them, and she looked over McCoy once more, liking him already. “You ought to get back, Doctor,” she said finally.

McCoy nodded, holding out his hand once more. “It was a pleasure to meet you, ma’am. I hope we’ll meet again,” he said gently as they shook hands, the gruff crust around him fading ever so slightly. 

She nodded and watched him walk out of the hall, another piece of Jim’s story flitting across her fingertips.

*

Slowly and surely, the true pieces of Jim’s story began to fit together, in front of Winona’s eyes. 

After the _Narada_ incident, after the Enterprise finally made it back to space dock, weeks after Nero ( _George’s killer_ ) was finally dead, she was, as usual, in her lab. It was quiet and dark, nighttime hours; some of her cadets had been lost in the incident, and there was still work to be done, especially in trying to assess the drill’s damage to Earth’s ecology. 

She couldn’t think of the dead anymore. The dead all but haunted her every step, now; she was just thankful Jim wasn’t one of them.

Sam had come to San Francisco a week ago, to see Jim. He’d tried to get her to come along, but she knew—she knew it had to be Jim. She was positive he knew she was here, at Starfleet. It was his story, his call. 

So, when the lab doors swooshed open, she was merely expected Johnson or Lativia, her fellow researchers. She wasn’t expecting Jim.

“Hi, Mom.”

She looked up from her padd, full of research and numbers, to find Jim in the doorway, small and tentative in the dim light. He looked so tall, so much older, but was still too-thin—perhaps he’d always be too thin, to her. 

She stood, and he stared at her, mouth agape. “You’re—you’ve got grey hairs,” he blurted out. 

“It’s been a few years, Jim,” she said quietly, smiling softly. 

Fists clenched at his side, he blinked rapidly, not moving. “Bones—McCoy—said you were here. Said so after we got back to space dock.”

“And I’m sure you took it well,” she said lightly, trying so hard to quell her urge to wrap him up to her side and shield him, just as she always tried. She’d ask about the nickname later.

“Nah, I punched him in the nose, and then he gave me a hypo that made my nose swell up, so it all worked out,” he said, laughing uneasily. “But—I don’t know. Sam said he tried to get you to come.”

Sitting back down on her stool, she watched him carefully, memorized his haircut, the scars along his temple and cheek. “I didn’t want to interfere, Jim. I know—I know you were mad at me.”

Jim pursed his mouth, ducking his head. “I just wanted to know about him, Mom,” he said finally, voice quiet and cracking. “It felt—it felt like you were hiding him from us, keeping him for yourself.”

Lump hard and immovable in her throat, she latched her fingers together tightly, white-knuckled and hardly breathing. “I kept him from me too, Jimmy,” she said firmly, though her voice wavered just enough. “I didn’t want to think about it either. I hid everything from all of us. I thought it was the only way we could live.”

Jim took a few steps closer to her, eyes oddly blue in the faint light from her lab desk—her eyes. Those were _hers_. “Think he’d be proud?”

The grip on her chest loosened slightly. “Jim, it wouldn’t matter _what_ you did, of course he’d be proud. And I just wanted you to have your own story, not your father’s. I’m never going to be anything but his widow, but you—you can be whatever you want,” she said gently. “I wanted you to be whatever you wanted.”

He watched her silently for a long moment, fingers drumming on the sides of his cadet uniform pants. “Pike said that I had Dad’s ‘look before you leap’ attitude,” he said finally. “But I read his stuff, his files, his papers—Dad was a planner. He planned everything, down to the last second on the _Kelvin_. So, I think it’s you I’ve got, Mom. And I like that.”

Tears slipped out of the corners of her eyes, but she brushed them away quickly, stomach unknotting. “I’m proud of you, Jim. I’m always proud of you,” she said softly, thinking of his cracking the lock on her door, the hack into her files—

“So, there’s this commendation thing,” Jim was saying, meeting her gaze directly. “For original and creative thinking. I—Mom, I want you to be there. And then you can meet Spock, and Bones, officially, and I don’t know, maybe we can go out to eat?”

In front of her eyes, Jim clicked together, all the snippets and bits of story and myth and fact rolling up into the strong, unwavering, clever, creative boy in front of her, who was some of George and some of her, but mostly the sum of his own parts. 

She smiled, nodded, and offered him the stool next to hers. She wanted to hear him fill in the blanks.

*


End file.
